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Neighborhood Restaurateur Reopens Famed Monte's Venetian Room

Monte’s Venetian Room in Gowanus will reopen with a new owner after closing three years ago after 102 years in business, according to NY1.com.

A landmark Brooklyn restaurant known as a mecca for everyone from entertainers to mobsters, Monte’s hopes to be open for business by June 1.

Going farther back in time, the restaurant was a speakeasy during Prohibition and even hosted the famous partying Rat Pack in later years.

New owner Dominick Castelvetre spent his boyhood across the street from the restaurant and "used to park cars for the restaurant" (shades of Goodfellas?), according to NY1.com.

The new Monte's will feature homemade pastas and brick-oven pizza. It will also feature the restaurant’s legendary Italian ricotta cheesecake, "which the new owners were able to obtain the recipe for."

You mean the iconic photo at the top of the site -- where old Carmine died gripping the cigar with his teeth. Either that, or a cop, probably John Coffey, put it there -- Coffey was known for doing crazy things, like getting drunk in restaurants while waiting for so-called mob graveyards to be excavated.

JOE SHOVED THE CIGAR BETWEEN HIS TEETH AND PROPPED CARMINES LEFT ARM IN PLACE AND WHEN THE LEFT ARM FELL TO THE GROUND JOE PULLED THE ELBOW OUT AND STUCK THE THUMB IN THE BUTTON HOLE TO KEEP IT IN PLACE. I KNOW I WAS THERE.

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I edited and updated this....."Nobody here can take a joke.""What's that? A gun? I got a gun. He got a gun. He got a gun... Everybody got guns!""Nothing's personal? What the fck is life, if it's not personal?!" "You smug kike midget, creeping around like a fcking dentist with the aether."

Fortunately, the show creators seemingly realized this -- and adjusted course accordingly, killing off a major character at the end of season two and introducing a new one in the current season.

This effectively administered a jolt of much-needed vitality into the HBO series, based (loosely, very loosely) on a true crime story about fortune, power, and greed centered on 1920s Atlantic City, but also in Chicago, New York, and tertiary locals.

Somewhere in the second season, it seemed increasingly apparent that behind all the great character actor…

They were actually arrested months back, on Sept. 6 while driving through Indiana and leading local police on a high-speed chase. Local police discovered prescription pills and heroin in the car, as well as the potential murder weapon.

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Four mobsters tied to the Gambino and Bonanno families were arrested.

Seventeen (identified below) were named in the indictment altogether; five escaped the predawn raids in Canada and are lamming it in the Great White North. They face Canada-wide warrants and one of the five "in the wind" is a descendant of a notorious Ndrangheta family based in Hamilton. His father and grandfather were both bosses.

The arrested in Canada include members of the Todaro crime family, established by the now-deceased Joseph (Lead Pipe Joe) Todaro, Sr., who took over after the death of Stefano (The Undertaker) Magaddino.

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Peter "Peter Pasta" Pellegrino, formerly of the Babylon, New York, restaurant known as Peter’s Italian Restaurant, really is -- or was -- a gangster.

The once-promising Bonanno member who appeared after the Kitchen Nightmares episode aired, now calls himself a brokester. And the Bonanno crime family, with which he was once affiliated has disowned him.

So has the rest of New York's Cosa Nostra, according to FBI documents and Peter Pasta himself.

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Back then Peter Pasta was an up-and-coming Bonanno associate who "earned" $15 grand a week bookmaking.

“Carl wants to swallow up everybody."
--Unnamed Mafia boss via surveillance recordingPART ONE
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Gambino wanted to rid New York of hundreds of Mafia members, then rebuild by inducting only select men who'd proved their loyalty. (He was preparing to open the books in 1973.)

Gambino, 70 at the time, believed the "Mafia must retreat to the past in order to survive," law enforcement officials said.

The first two crime families on the block were to be the Luchese and Colombo crime families. Then the Bonanno crime family.

"Twenty percent of known Mafia members in New York are currently under indictment in cases developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation alone."

A lowlife scumbag gets his due when he finally scams the wrong guy and gets his head blown off.
That's the whole story, in a nutshell. There are a few twists however.

First off, who is the wrong guy of which we speak?

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He tells us via Shaun Attwood, the "Jon" of the jail journal, who spent years in one of America’s toughest jails, Maricopa County, which generates lots of media attention on a regular basis. (As did Sheriff Joe Arpaio himself, especially when he was freed from his own legal entanglement for civil rights violations and other minor (we're being sarcastic here) stuff via presidential pardon.)